TCP and UDP compared to Humans

Greg Knauss gives a fun alternative comparison of a neurotic person to others who have the look of do-not-care.

TCP people — people with the TCP personality type — consume everything in their feeds. Every tweet, every e-mail, every photo. They’re completists, and neurotic completists at that.

[….]

UDP people think TCP people are bonkers. They’ll dip in and out of whatever data happens to be sluicing towards them at any particular moment, without giving the slightest thought to what might have come before and what might come after. If it’s important, they think, it will probably come around again. Missing something, by definition, makes it unimportant.

This post brought a lot of memories of my early professional career. I was a TCP person then with thousands of bookmarks, unread books at home, 100+ subscriptions in my feed reader. All of it lead to me being unhappy with not doing enough to reduce the count of these. I did not transition into a UDP person as you might expect but rather I set myself a goal of owning/using only that I absolutely needed and curated the hell out of my collection. I threw/gave away books that I am not going to read multiple times, deleted bookmarks that looked interesting and fun but helps me in no way either professionally or personally. Curated my feed subscriptions and removed those that I don’t need eventhough they were great.

I suppose I am still a TCP person but I have gotten better at managing things and keeping myself happy. I will always be a TCP person and that is something I have made peace with. Remember “Constraint is Liberation” and “Unlimited Freedom is a disaster for humanity”.